Vocal Habits: What's Helped You — or Held You Back?

🎤 Vocal Habits: What’s Helped You — or Held You Back?

Over time, every singer picks up habits — some that support healthy singing, and some that we later have to unlearn.

What’s one vocal habit — good or bad — that you’ve developed?
How has it helped your singing — or challenged it?

Share your experience below!
Bonus points if you share how you discovered it — we can all learn from each other. 🎶

10 replies

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    • Stefan_Grunwald
    • 1 mth ago
    • Reported - view

    For me it was not tensing, or relaxing /releasing my neck and jaw while I am singing, I first heard that in a masterclass of the late Hans Hotter, when I was surprised that he didn’t have much else to say, but when I started with Alexandertechnique, I realized how important that was, and I am sure that kept my voice fresh for more than 40 years of singing. 

      • Coffee-drinking soprano, trainer of voices and tonebase voice content lead
      • Heidi_Vass
      • 1 mth ago
      • Reported - view

      This is a brilliant observation.. in singing as in so many other areas of life, that golden mean concept is the aim - not too much or too little.

    • JohnEric_Robinson
    • 1 mth ago
    • Reported - view

    I am only now learning to fully relax my larynx. This makes singing easier across my range, and my range keeps growing—I hit C2 (two octaves below middle C) for the first time today in my lesson.

      • Steve_Simpson
      • 1 mth ago
      • Reported - view

       What do you do to relax your larynx?

      • JohnEric_Robinson
      • 1 mth ago
      • Reported - view

      What have I done to learn to fully relax my larynx?

      My teacher and I have been working on this for nine months now, so it's been a process. 

      My teacher started me with yawning wide, a few times an hour, daily, for a couple of weeks to open up my throat.

      She has me, daily, singing falsetto notes up to my top, at first blowing through a straw into water, then, for a few months now, doing this with a full cuperto instead. We often sing a note, all the way up into the whistle register, then sing down an octave in a falsetto mix, then go up a major second and back down a couple of times.

      She has taught me to spread my neck muscles wide, to keep my jaw joint open (I sang vowels with a chop stick in my mouth for a couple of months), my chin in, my neck long yet loose. She often advises me to sing while moving my jaw from side to side to make sure I'm not holding anywhere.

      The back of my tongue stays elevated for all vowels, with a nearly imperceptible change in the tongue the only difference in forming different vowels.

      Daily she has me working down to my bottom, singing down a five tone major scale, often oo - ee on each note and then just oo at the bottom.

      If I'm getting in the weeds on a note I'm capable of hitting, she has me sing a half tone up and stretch gently down.

      After beginning the phrase with a relaxed larynx and vibrato, I keep the larynx loose with vibrato and allow it to rise as it needs to, while maintaining a low laryngeal position in general (a couple of lessons ago she identified me as a baritone, and as such she says I will have no occasion to sing with a high larynx — I thought I was a tenor when we began working together).

      At the moment, we are keeping the vibrato broad at the bottom, as she says this will help open up my lower extension, always keeping air out of the sound as best I can as I learn to sing with my cords lighty closed from the top to the bottom of my range.

      Over the course of these nine months, I've gone from a gravely G2 (G below C below middle C) to a relatively clear C2 (two octaves below middle C) in my lesson this past Monday.

      • Gosia.1
      • 1 mth ago
      • Reported - view

       very interesting. I am looking for a good vocal teacher. Yours seems very good.

    • Steve_Simpson
    • 1 mth ago
    • Reported - view

    When I have a passage that has continuous high notes such as C5 and D5 my throat gradually tightens to the point that I strain to sing them and by the time I get to an E5, my throat is so tight nothing comes out.  I am told it's all in my head which seems to be true because if I don't think about the upcoming notes, I do better but I haven't figured out how to sing without tension. I know I can sing these notes because I've done it but I don't have command over them yet. Still looking for an exercise or advice that will help.

      • Coffee-drinking soprano, trainer of voices and tonebase voice content lead
      • Heidi_Vass
      • 1 mth ago
      • Reported - view

      So much of the business of managing tension is a project of changing the subject in your brain and deciding to enjoy the high notes. So much tension is built simply in the anticipation of tension. Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of repeating notes is the compounding of that tension. A change in habit (physical or mental) is almost always the key to finding a release and most importantly a TRUST in the sound and in your body's ability to create profound beauty :) 

      • Steve_Simpson
      • 1 mth ago
      • Reported - view

       Thanks for your help. I am going to try tapping for the mental part and see how that goes.

      • Coffee-drinking soprano, trainer of voices and tonebase voice content lead
      • Heidi_Vass
      • 1 mth ago
      • Reported - view

      Ooh! Keep us posted :)

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